FEMINIST AND CRITICAL RESEARCH

Feminist ethnography has not just produced some of the most in-depth
material about women’s lives but also enabled significant challenges to
what comes to be counted as knowledge. (Skeggs, 2001: 437)
Positivists (positivism) try to be value-neutral or objective. Interpretive
researchers (interpretivism) accept that values are important and sometimes even that their own
values cannot be avoided, but they usually
believe social research should attempt to be value-free. For many interpretivists, there is often no
attempt to try to change the world, just to
describe it. Critical social researchers, on the other hand, argue that the
purpose of research is to discover flaws and faults in society, and to find
ways of dealing with these; to reveal their policy implications or suggest
(or even take) action to implement change. Critical researchers tend to
study the underdogs, the oppressed, and the powerless in society, and so
ethnography has explored political and social minority groups, hospitalised ill, the victims of
crime, migrant workers, and the handicapped.
The idea is to give voice to the voiceless, the hushed. Critical ethnography tries to explain why
certain people fail to reach their goals, or fail
to get their feelings known, have their rights acknowledged, their
achievements recognised.
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Feminist ethnography is one variety of the critical approach; here
the focus is on issues of dominance and oppression as they relate to
women’s lives. Their ontological position is that oppressed groups, structures of patriarchy and
control, and dominance, all exist as phenomena.
Epistemologically, feminist ethnography is to some extent premised on
an attack on the basic tenets of positivism. While positivism pretends to
be neutral and detached, so this argument goes, it is in fact very masculine and male focused. It is
based on a distinction between male and
female, men and women, which posits men as more detached, focused,
and objective, and women as more subjective, warm, soft, and understanding (Harding, 1991). In
positivist approaches, social researchers are
advised not to engage with the interviewee, not to display emotions, to
ask all questions in the same way and the same order, and not to affect
the outcome (Oakley, 1981). Positivist approaches, feminist literature
argues, assume that the researcher is intellectually superior and dominant, as is demonstrated in
the language of research ‘subjects’, ‘respondents’, and ‘informants’. Furthermore, survey
interviews (which is
considered the preferred method for positivists, see below) do not let
the researcher talk, or the researched wander off the point, suggest new
avenues, or digress. Positivist research seeks standardisation of interviews, as if interviewees as
well as interviewers can be made to be interchangeable, looking for the common ground and
ignoring individual
differences. They insist on ‘yes and no’, answers, which can be intimidating or bullying in an
interview. The approach strips away context,
reducing the situation to general themes and calculable recurrences.
Ann Oakley (1981) described how when she studied childbirth, the
women wanted to ask her questions, and a scientific approach meant she
was not supposed to respond to them. She said this felt exploitative and
uncomfortable, but more than that, she wonders how one can begin to
understand someone and empathise with them with such detachment.
And if we cannot empathise and understand, how can we explain their
actions? Objectivity means detachment, but it is impossible to be
detached when we are researching something we are involved in or have
experienced ourselves. Furthermore, women have always found empathy and involvement a
useful way to understand each other, so why
should this not work in social research? This is how women understand
each other.
She goes further. Positivists pretend to be neutral in their research
design as well as their analysis, but what in fact they do is write their
assumptions into the design of the work. The dominant culture gets
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written in, with women’s roles belittled (survey research rarely asks
about housework, friendships, informal work, and so on and it has been
very difficult to get these topics on the research agenda as a result). The
very vocabulary in questionnaires can make women defensive about
their roles, or can simply exclude them and their interpretations.
Furthermore, many early researchers completely ignored women from
their research. Research has tended to focus on the public side of life
(especially positivist research).
A FEMINIST METHODOLOGY
As a result of such debates, feminists worked out a new methodology
that involved listening more, but allowed researchers to talk if they felt
they needed to; empowering interviewees to set the agenda and the outcome while not
withholding from them the researcher’s own experiences and feelings. In this methodology
questions should not be rigid;
the agenda should not be fixed. It rests on an epistemological stance that
says if you want to understand someone’s world, you have to get inside
it. This has resonances with many debates within ethnography, as covered under the concepts of
participant observation, insider ethnography, and going ‘native’.
Many anthropologists have argued for the need to get into the meaning world of the other, and to
suspend attempts at objectivity (see various discussions in Ellen, 1984). Some talk of being
socialised into a
culture, learning to do it; or ‘learning to behave according to the native’s
rules’ (Bates, 1996: 24) in order to gain an insight into their world. Like
ethnographers’ debate about insiders and outsiders, some feminists go so
far as to argue that there needs to be a shared culture between interviewer and interviewee. So,
black women are needed to interview black
women, a study of mothers should have a mother as interviewer, only
a Kosovan refugee can understand a Kosovan refugee, and so on. Of
course, there are difficulties with how far this can be taken and others
argue that you need distance to be able to see clearly, or to be socialised
into a culture and then leave it, in order to regain distance. Too much
closeness, some believe, leads to a lack of clarity in the resulting study.
Nevertheless, all feminists agree that we can know much more, and
much more honestly, if we give of ourselves a little, if we are warm,
receptive, and accepting. Otherwise the dominant values are simply
repeated, as the interviewee tells us what she thinks we want to hear.
This suggests that the really interesting factors of social life are not
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always on the surface, and are not always easily discovered. Sometimes
they even come as a surprise to the interviewee. With this kind of epistemology, the research is a
conversation, a relationship, between two or
more people, in which one learns about the other through interaction
and experience, and then tries to interpret these findings for the academic (or whatever)
audience.
FEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHY
It is easy to see why this sort of approach lends itself to the methods of
contemporary ethnography. Ethnography uniquely, despite its positivist
roots, permits a long-term view, gives participants a voice, is unobtrusive,
gentle, almost passive, and emphasises lived experience. It also facilitates
the discovery of how the everyday contributes to the maintenance of
power (Skeggs, 2001).
Attending to gender issues is not necessarily a new trend in ethnography. Many of the earlier
anthropologists (Margaret Mead, Hortense
Powdermaker, Ruth Benedict) not only explored gender but also questioned power relations,
including their own impact on the field (Skeggs,
2001). But it was the reflexive (or literary) turn (see reflexivity) that
really awoke sensitivities to the role of the ethnographer in the construction of accounts and the
politics of representation, and feminism
has been implicated in this both in informing this critique and being
affected by the outcome (Visweswaran, 1997). Feminist ethnographies
also have their own traditions within sociology, education, and cultural
studies. But contemporary feminist ethnographies do not simply look at
women, they are informed by feminist politics, and acknowledge that
gender cannot be separated from race, class, and sexual identity.
Postmodernists, queer theorists, and feminists of colour have all had
their impacts on ‘gender essentialism’.
For some examples of feminist ethnography you might try Faye
Ginsburg’s (1989) sensitive study of both sides of the abortion debate
in the US, Beverley Skeggs’ (1997) study of women’s working-class cultures, or Martin Mac an
Ghaill’s (1994) The Making of Men, which is a
study of Asian men, deploying feminist analysis. I can also recommend
the collection by Bell et al. (1993). You might also enjoy some of the
chapters in Anthias and Lazaridis (2000), which explores the lives of
women migrants in various sectors of European society. In my own
chapter (O’Reilly, 2000) I describe the marginalisation and feelings of
loneliness and isolation experienced by such an apparently privileged
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group as North to South migrants. The influence of holism on ethnographic methods has meant
that even those who do not normally consider their work feminist can find themselves alerted to
gendered
experiences.
See also: critical ethnography; ethics; realism; reflexivity